Popeye

A Popeye: A Trump Derangement Note That I Have to Mention…[Corrected and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Several readers have sent me this insane, hysterical post by a guy who claims to be “middle of the road” and it caused me to pledge not to keep posting on Trump Deranged outbursts: there are too many of them, they are embarrassing, and it doesn’t change anything. Then I see a post by an old freind, a tenured history professor at a major U.S. university, in which he writes, “106 years ago today (i.e., 02 Oct 1919), President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke. His wife Edith essentially took over running the White House for the rest of is term. The 25th Amendment was still 48 years away in the future. No particular reason for mentioning the 25th Amendment right now…”

You mean now as opposed to during the previous four years, when this same scholar saw no reason to make a comparison with Wilson when it was screamingly obvious that the President really was cognitively disabled and needed to be removed?

Of course this objective, trustworthy “expert” detected no parallels with Wilson while POTUS shambled around, got disoriented and had his wife handling him like a member of Visiting Angels, but now, as his successor displays staggering amounts of energy and purpose not just for a man his age but for anyone of any age (the correct parallel isn’t Wilson but Teddy Roosevelt), a credentialed historian thinks he can’t do the job, and that an elected President should be removed from office as “disabled.”

Translation: “Disabled”= “Not a Democrat.”

Trump won’t do the job the way that the batty American Left wants him to do it. That’s all.

I need some spinach…

Harris Is a D.E.I. Vice-President, and Ethics Alarms Hereby Pledges To Reiterate That Fact Every Time Some Liar, Hack or Gaslighter Says Otherwise…[Link Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I’m drawing a line in the sand on this one. I am sick of the flagrant attempts by shameless partisans, Axis of Unethical Conduct liars and desperate Trump-Deranged propagandists to deny the past and the present, their own misdeeds, and their cascading humiliating botches. I am also disgusted with the ongoing efforts of these same aspiring dictators to win arguments and election by strangling the language and issuing rhetorical taboos so it becomes difficult to reveal what they have done, or allows the public to be confused and misled permanently.

Readers here are aware of some of my unyielding pledges. I have vowed to blow a blast on a metaphorical Sousaphone every time someone quotes the phony “76 cents on the dollar” statistic “proving” that the workplace discriminates against women. (The last time I scored a politician for doing that? It was Kamala Harris. Of course it was.) I have sworn to embarrass any movie, TV program or ad that shows someone playing chess with the board set up incorrectly. I am determined never to let an ethics dunce argue that cheater Barry Bonds belongs in the Hall of Fame because “other players did it” or because “he was good enough that he would have had a HOF career if he hadn’t cheated.” (That one makes me furious just writing it.)

I am never going to countenance anyone calling the stupid January 6 riot an “insurrection,” saying that Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was “rigged” is “baseless,” or who repeats any of the multiplying Big Lies about what Trump has said in the past, the most recent example being flagged in a post today. I will not let any demagogue get away with saying that baker Jack Phillips discriminated against gay people when he said he would not be compelled to express approval of a gay wedding on one of his cakes because he believed this infringed his First Amendment rights.

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A Popeye: The Mystery Word

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

It was 11 am, and having dropped my wife off for a physical therapy session and skipped breakfast, I decided to indulge my self in a guilty pleasure: a McDonald’s sausage biscuit. Say what you will about Mickey D’s: their sausage biscuits beat Jimmy Dean’s, and don’t tempt me to talk about the 7-11 barely-edible version.

So I waited in the Drive-Thru line at the nearest branch (the one that only occasionally get its orders right), and when I finally reached the speaker, made a quick and simple request: “A hash browns and sausage biscuit, please. That’s all.”

A woman said in an impenetrable accent, “Sorry, no biscuit. Just [????].” I had no clue what she was saying. It sounded like “eh.” “Pardon me? Could you repeat that?,” I asked. “No biscuit. Only [????].” Well, I had already decided to cancel the order, since the whole point was the item that wasn’t available, but as a matter of principle, I was damned if I was going to leave without knowing what the mystery word was.

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A Popeye: I Know It’s Just Another Stupid Slide Show But I Can’t Let “The Worst Actors Of All Time, Ranked” Pass Without Spitting On It

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

I tried to restrain myself, I really did. I have a heavy backlog of ethics topics and some Comments of the Day from all of you languishing. But a post headlined “The Worst Actors of All Time, Ranked” on a website called Definitions.org sucked me in, and I’m annoyed.

To begin with, the clickbait headline is a lie, several lies in fact. Since every actor in the list of 50 “worst actors” is alive and was active in the 21st century, it can’t possibly be an “all time” list. Then, once you click on the title, the list magically becomes “the 50 actors the critics can’t stand.” Well, at least that explains why Natalie Portman didn’t make the list of 50 Worst.

I’m not even sure what criteria one could or should use to decide on the “worst actors.” Most over-rated (like Portman)? Narrowest range? If an actor plays a particular type better than anyone, even if he or she never tries anything else, that doesn’t make them bad actors. As a director, I have always maintained that at least 85% of the public could play at least one role in a major movie well.

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From “The Popeye” File, Ethics Dunce: Kurt Streeter, NYT Sports Columnist

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I’ve complained about Streeter before, but he really needs to be officially flagged as an Ethics Dunce, hence this Popeye post, an Ethics Alarms feature when my alternatives are to write or throw myself into a woodchipper. Streeter personifies the general principle that if a reader can tell your race while reading your work product about a topic that doesn’t have anything to do with race, you’re biased and laboring under a conflict of interest while using your job to advance personal agendas and grievances.

Streeter now writes the once iconic “Sports of The Times” column, and, the Times tells us, “he has a particular interest in the connection between sports and broader society, especially regarding issues of race, gender and social justice.” Translation: He exploits sports to advance his social justice hobby horses rather than enlighten readers about what he’s supposed to be writing about. His presence as the New York Times’ most prestigiously-presented sportswriter tells us exactly what the New York Times cares about, and it sure isn’t sports.

Sports is often about ethics, and Streeter’s Sunday Times column column today pretends to be about ethics. It’s called “Tokyo Olympians Are Showing That Grit Can Be Graceful,” and a few of his entries raise some great ethics issues. For example, I didn’t know, because watching the greed- and Larry Vaughn Effect-driven Olympics could not drag me from my disorderly sock drawer, that high jumpers Mutaz Essa Barshim of Qatar and Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy agreed to forgo a jumpoff that would have decided the competition so they could share the Olympic gold medal. That’s fascinating, because the deal could be the ultimate display of sportsmanship and respect, or a calculated decision to maximize personal gain while minimizing risk of loss at the expense of competition, which is, after all, what fans want to see. Streeter, however, can’t see the issue, and instead has to take his social justice warrior cheap shot. “They knew full well they would be blasted by those who claim that there must always be a single winner, that sharing is weak and — even worse — unmanly,” he writes. Streeter is so tiresome and predictable.

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An Ethics Alarms Popeye: Boy Am I Sick Of THIS Lie!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

As a long-time Popeye fan, I established the Ethics Alarms designation in the spinach-gulping sailor’s honor to mark the times when I feel compelled to rail against a particularly persistent media distortion of reality. This morning’s New York Times sports section, in a bottom of the page article about ESPN firing one of its more political hosts now earns a Popeye for this bit of deliberate disinformation, aimed at smearing the President (of course). As has been a pattern at the Times, President Trump had little connection to the story but it was decided that a gratuitous attack was appropriate anyway.

Reporter Keven Draper wrote (and Times editors accepted) this:

Le Batard publicly criticized ESPN’s tepid approach to covering politics after President Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to “the crime-infested places from which they came” — comments that even members of Trump’s party condemned as racist.

Although this is how the President’s admittedly stupid and inflammatory tweets have been misquoted since they were posted, that is not what he tweeted. Here are the tweets in question:

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Congratulations To New York Times Reporters Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, Winners Of The First Ethics Alarms “Popeye”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Now and then I see or read about something that seems too trivial for a post, but it gnaws on me and torments me, and I worry that, like Lewis Black’s famous over-heard  “if it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college,” it will fester and eventually kill me. I’m going to launch a new category for these things, the Popeye, in honor of the gruff spinach-eating sailor’s quote that signaled a fight was coming, “That’s all I can stands, cuz I can’t stands no more!”

This morning, while reading this story by Times reporters Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman about the President gratuitously attacking his own Attorney General, I read this sentence…

“But even if Mr. Sessions remains in his job, the relationship between him and Mr. Trump — the Alabama lawyer and the Queens real estate developer, an odd couple bound by a shared conviction that illegal immigration is destroying America — is unlikely to ever be the same, according to a half-dozen people close to Mr. Trump.”

Wait—when did Sessions or the President express the “conviction” that ” illegal immigration is destroying America”? I googled the phrase. Few references came up, but over half of those that weren’t quotes of this article came from pro-illegal immigrant sources, as their exaggerated characterization of what illegal immigration critics say or think. It is a false representation, explicitly designed to make such critics appear hysterical and foolish.  Continue reading →